From Paul Osuyi, Asaba
The post-election crisis that recently rocked the Delta State chapter of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) saw the exit of the founding member and immediate past chairman of the party in the state, Oke Idawene. The crisis pitted the party’s governorship candidate, Kenneth Gbagi against the Idawene-led executive committee, a development that might have accounted for the woeful performance of the SDP in the last elections in Delta State. In this interview, Idawene bared his mind on the intrigues that played out which saw him leaving the party.
What has been going on in your former party, SDP?
Before I answer your question, let me say that I am a founding member of SDP, a political son of Olu Falae and I have led SDP at the state and national level. I was the leader of SDP state chairmen until recently when I controversially left. I moved Delta SDP to its level.
As chairman of the party, why did you leave it for strangers?
You don’t throw away the baby with the bath water. I must have left SDP as a result of issues. In summary, prior to the primaries for the governorship election, a lot of overtures came in from resourceful Deltans to run for the governorship election. Some preferred to come for substitution because of the way their parties were being handled then, while some were jostling for the ticket. At that moment, two strangers called from abroad, and we met at Ughelli. They refused to tell me who they were preparing the ground for. Later, I found out that Gbagi sent them. Before I knew it, he went to Abuja and paid half of the money for nomination forms, and on trust, they gave him the forms. He came to Delta and I refused to go to his house. The national chairman called me and out of respect, I went to his house and we talked. I gave him reasons why he should not join SDP but he said he was ready to work with me, and that former Speaker, Victor Ochei told him that he can trust me. And we began. But the moment we did primaries for him, everything changed. He went to Abuja and the party gave all forms for the entire state to come and give to aspirants without my knowledge. As he returned, he started telling the aspirants that I am a nobody, that he is the one in charge of the party in Delta. From that moment, all the aspirants who were coming to our office changed their allegiance to Oginibo where he hails from. He hijacked the party and refused to submit to me as state chairman. At that point we tolerated it. Till date he has not paid for those forms he collected. Then before I knew it, he collected party membership cards and started issuing them out. That phase passed, we started submitting names of candidates for National Assembly to Abuja because the new rule says we must submit to the national headquarters to upload to the INEC server. Only for me to submit the 10 House of Representatives candidates, some surrogates to Abuja and three senators to Abuja, but Gbagi went to Abuja to halt the process, saying that I have no right to submit the names to the party. Again the party listened to him but asked me to take three slots and leave others for him being a former Minister. I warned them against Gbagi that he cannot deliver, they insisted on giving him the chance. Do you know that we ended up having three candidates for House of Representatives, we had no candidates for Senate, the three surrogates he submitted, he could not replace them. Gbagi did not come to SDP with one person, he is using my structure till date. When that happened, the national chairman was angry. So for the House of Assembly, they gave me all to handle. Out of 29 slots, I did 28 for SDP. The only one that did not go through was the one handed over to him which is Sapele. You can imagine how he de-marketed the party with the lack of candidates. He boasted again that he was going to use the court to bring in the names that were not on the INEC list. He tossed us here and there, the aspirants were so happy, so that they abandoned the SEC and were going to his hotel and house. And at the end of the day, the names were not published. It was a woeful outing for SDP in Delta State just because of one man.
Why did it take you so long to realise this?
We were tolerating him, hoping that things will change but he does not take advice from anybody; his decision was final, he is not a team player and does not submit to party leadership. We have the first issue and we resolved it. Then the campaign started. If we agree on the amount to pay the people going with us on campaign, he does not pay. He is the only politician I have seen asking for an account for transfer. Once or two, small money was distributed to the party and that was all. I cannot tell you that the candidate funded the party at any level. We had issues during campaigns, they would hold party leaders to ransom after he had left. It happened in Ukwuani, Burutu, Bomadi where they locked us because we refused to do as promised. I spent N4,930,000.00 in Gbagi’s campaign, the only money he gave to me throughout the period was N1 million. First he paid N500,000,00, the second N500,000.00 was a gift from him after we had issues. For a billionaire who claims he has money and wants to win an election, you could not even fund the SEC or even the people working with him. The last time I saw him was December 27 in his house when he said he wanted to give rice to widows. He locked out the state exco, and we were booed. A bucket of rice and N3,000 was what he shared to the widows who came from far. They cried before leaving. There was nothing like Christmas for any member of the party from him. So the campaigns were not going well; he said the party is not on ground, and that he wants to work with the churches, that they will vote for him, and that Labour Party and Accord were working for him. The candidates were gnashing their teeth. At one point, he did some banners here and there but all this work, the campaign structure that we set up, me as the adviser, he never took my advice. When I advised that he should be using Channels, he said we were gossiping about him. He is such a difficult and complicated man. On December 18, I was going to his campaign in Bomadi, I had an accident, my vehicle condemned, I almost died. Only for him to say that I faked the accident. I organised a thanksgiving, he said it was a fake thanksgiving. He took five percent of the state exco and bought them over. He divided the party right from there.
But why do you have to go to the length of attempting to withdraw SDP from the petition Gbagi filed against Sheriff Oborevwori of the PDP?
For the guber election, the presidential candidate, Adewole Adebayo came and told me not to do anything because he thought we were going to disown him.
But Gbagi was never ready for election, I make bold to say. He told me when I met him in his house that his own goal is to go to court and he would win from the courts. And because I felt his plans were different I never knew he was going to go about it wrongly. As we moved on, we were deceived that money would come for the guber election. I had pressures from other parties to move on with the entire party structure. I have no personal issues with Gbagi, what we have is an official issue. Adebayo asked me to hold and not leave, that money will come before the guber election. I waited we did not see money. All the party agents submitted by leaders did not get a dime. We didn’t work together, we did not also sell him out. We now gave him long rope to know if he will repent only for him to by-pass us in Asaba and went to Abuja, secured the understanding of the national legal adviser who came to Delta and stayed for two weeks without my knowledge. He went to the tribunal to file the petition using SDP. We had big issues but refused to go to the press because we loved the party, I still do love the party. We only heard it on the news that Gbagi has filed a petition. And the legal adviser was complaining in Abuja about how he was maltreated when he came to Asaba. So we said no, we met as a party and agreed to expunge SDP from the petition because we were not aware, and that our supposed candidate did not prepare for election and never won the election. And we said before SDP, there is Delta State, we are not going to use our resources to pursue cases here and there. I got an attorney, did an affidavit and applied to withdraw SDP from the petition. The moment it was filed, and I could not have done that without informing some SWC members because I was an institution in SDP in Nigeria, I am an operations man.
But the national leadership dissolved your executive and later suspended you…
Dr. Agunloye, it is a pity that a man of his caliber can be doing such a thing. Let me tell you when the time came for collection of tags from INEC, he forged a letter to INEC that they should allow Gbagi or me or the state secretary to receive the tags. I immediately called the national chairman who disowned the directive given by Agunloye. He had to call the state INEC to hand over the tags to the state chairman. At that time, Gbagi was mounting pressure on INEC in Delta, calling me a thief. But INEC asked him not to drag the commission into the internal affairs of SDP and that they knew me as the state chairman. The letter from Agunloye was disregarded and I picked the tags and distributed them; 23 got missing in transit. But we are not cowards, no NWC meeting was held before he wrote that dissolution letter. So I called the leaders; 42 of us came to Asaba to pay a congratulatory visit to the governor-elect since he had the mind to write the letter. If you can knock us on the head without looking at our status, we can also bite your anus with the feces coming out without looking at your age. We organised ourselves for the courtesy visit not to spite the party but there is a Delta State which we all must build. We got to Oborevwori and declared that we have withdrawn from the case, that we are supporting him to succeed in Delta, and that every other candidate should withdraw. We have no regret doing that, Oborevwori won the election. That same day around 4pm, Agunloye wrote another letter purportedly suspending all of us from the party; there was no meeting held. At the end of the day, the party kept quiet in Abuja, here in Delta the state exco members were angry. So we said there was no point holding on in the face of atrocities. At that point, I resigned honourably from the party because he cannot tell the court that at the point when I was writing the resignation letter I was not the chairman of the party. It was done out of the atrocities, disloyalty, disrespect and maneuvering of Gbagi against the SDP in Delta. And for the national body to give him such leverage to bring the legal adviser to come and oppress us again, we detest oppression, we don’t have any iota or a drop of cowardice in our DNA.
What do you think are the chances of his petition now that you have left the party?
I resigned from the party but the leaders are still there, the agents are still there. The agents are ready to testify because the national leadership recently wrote a letter to back the petition. If the CP goes to court to say that a crime was committed in Delta, the IG now writes that the crime was not committed. The IG has the right to override the CP ordinarily. But when the case starts, the CP will bring in the DPOs and DCOs to testify about what he had earlier claimed. That is what you are going to see in that case. The agents in the LGAs as captured by INEC will go to court to testify that Gbagi was never ready for election and Oborevwori won the election. I am saying Oborevwori won the election fair and square because he was the only one ready for elections; our candidate was never ready from day one. Agents of the party have told me that they are going to testify that he was not ready for election. Thank God Deltans rejected Gbagi. A man who has less than 5,000 votes in the entire state, is making claims.
There is an allegation that you were paid to scuttle Gbagi’s chances even at the tribunal?
They are lies from the pit of hell. I have narrated all that transpired, how many people can tolerate what we tolerated. People were calling me to ask how we were managing Gbagi. You can find out from Fineboy and Sadhere, both House of Representatives candidates; they no longer pick his calls. So nobody paid us, we tolerated him to that point. He was now happy that he had dwarfed us and he can’t dwarf us because we all have one head each.